Friday, 8 April 2016

He listens to the stirring of the earth with bated breath and he gasps,

He dips nose into the dusk of the setting suns rays,

With a heart full of mirth in the twilight he plays..

Nightime is coming, hedgehog stretches and yawns,

A soul full of gladness as he scurries and scrawns -

He opens his throat to sing a happy hedgehog song,

Full of mystery and moonlight - here is where he belongs.

The hedgehog is free as he ever should be,

About his business unknown to most folk - you and me.

Betwixt hither and thither he may yet be found,

If you are careful and cautious and you do not make a sound.

Hedgehog is a friend that you mayhap will meet,

If ever you do so, please be kind and be sweet,

For his temper is gentle as at wonders he's guessing,

From old England he comes with many a blessing.

c.Titus.L 2016

Having
been found near Lake Windemere in the Lake District and too small to
survive the winter outside, Hedgehog Bramble was taken to the Animal
Rescue Center in Kendal where he has overwintered and put on necessary
weight.

Now that spring has come and he has grown, Bramble came into our care for 'soft - release' back into the wilds. This
entails having him in an outside pen which also has a small run to
allow him to reacclimatise to the night air, smells and sounds - to be
released as weather allows.

Having seen night cam footage of how
eager Bramble was to be free, he spent many hours Sunday night clinging
to his enclosure and peering hopefully beyond, we decided to release him
a soon as possible. We recently had a long rainy spell and as a few
days of lighter weather were forecast, we removed the pen gateway and
Bramble was released on the evening of Monday 4th of April.
We didnt get to see the night cam footage till next day and as you can see he was delighted to be free.
We
were very anxious that he did not appear the next night on camera, nor
was any food eaten - but to our delight last night not only did he find
his way back to his soft release home and gobble a hearty dinner, but he
also seems to have relocated his daylight sleeping quarters to occupy
one of Hedgehog Noah's ocassionally used houses that we built.

If you find a hedgehog in need or other animal in distress please contact the RSPCA
tel 0300 123 4999
You
can find information on domestic and wild animals as well as advice
about general pet care, animal welfare law, animal rehoming and vet
care. You can also find details of local vets, council and police for
non-emergency situations.

Hedgehogs are a protected species in the Uk but we've lost a third of
all our hedgehogs in the last ten years. There is a Petition to give the
hedgehog better legal protection to reverse its decline. Please sign
the petition ( sign the petition here )

Sunday, 6 March 2016

Industrial whaling began in the 17th century, by the 20th factory ships & 'whale harvesting' developed. By the 1930s, more than 50,000 whales were killed annually. In 1986 the International Whaling Commission (IWC) banned commercial whaling.

Now, whales are mysteriously dying - during January 2016, 29 sperm whales got stranded and died across Europe. It seems they became lost in shallow waters, but why? Were they affected by something humans did – busy shipping lanes, seismic testing, military noise or the ‘invisible’ threats of toxic chemicals in the seas...

The tails of two fin whales caught off the western coast of Iceland in 2009. (Photo: Halldor Kolbeins/AFP/Getty Images)

It is amazing that in the year 2016, with the diminishment of
biodiversity and with species after species going extinct, that there
are still people so alienated from reality that they continue to engage
in contributing to the death of the ocean. We humans are literally
killing the ocean by diminishment of the life within. Many Faroese
overfish, they slaughter puffins and other seabirds and they murder
whales and dolphins.

Whale Song: A Culture All Of Its Own

'The first whale culture to be discovered was the ‘song’
of the humpback whale in the 1960s. At the time researchers did not know
that what they were observing was cultural transmission between the
whales, but they and the general public were so struck by the discovery
that the whales were ‘singing’ that humpback whale song was even
included in the Golden Record sent into outer space in the late 1970s on
the Voyager spacecraft.

Since its first discovery humpback song has been studied in many
parts of the world. Male humpbacks sing the longest, most complex songs
in the animal kingdom. Songs consist of a complex series of whistles,
squeals and deep calls. Their songs may last for as long as half an hour
and are divided into 'verses' which are sung in a specific order.' Source = WDC here.

From the Greenpeace Article January 2016
''Shocking and sad images have been all over the media in the past few days as some massive sperm whales have washed up dead on British beaches. Normally humans and these deep water leviathans live far apart, so it’s understandable that we are surprised and distraught to encounter them like this. But why does it happen? And what can you do?
Sperm whales are huge. They have the biggest animal brain on the
planet, and make some of the deepest dives in the ocean, where their
legendary battles with giant squid fuel our imagination. Immortalised by
Moby Dick and Pinocchio, their fictitiously fearsome reputation
sometimes overshadows the fact that these were the first whale to be
decimated by industrial whaling to be turned into oil. They tend to live
and travel in groups, and you don’t normally see them in shallow water
like the North Sea.

Every year hundreds of dead whales, dolphins and
porpoises wash up dead on British beaches. Amongst them there are usually a few
sperm whales. Recently it seems that a whole pod of sperm whales has
somehow got lost in the North Sea, stuck on beaches and tragically died.

That then begs a question as to how they got lost? Were they
chasing prey? Was it freak weather? Were they affected by something humans did –
busy shipping lanes, seismic testing, military noise or something else? There
are also the ‘invisible’ threats that whales in our seas carry, most notably a
heavy burden of toxic chemicals which could have played a part somehow.
Across the world, as whale populations recover from decades
of commercial whaling, they increasingly face a range of new human-generated
threats, which are much less visible, but just as deadly. That’s been shown in
the pilot whales killed by underwater noise, and the killer whale that got
caught up in fishing gear.

The WDC are running a campain to protect the Whales from Antarctic hunting

Don't let the EU sell out 4000 whales

The EU and Japan are looking to increase trade in goods
and services with each other – in other words make loads and loads of
money. They are close to signing a new trade agreement.

Great BUT…A. Japan hunts and slaughters hundreds of whales each year. It wants to kill 4,000 in the Antarctic over the next 12 years!B. The EU does not support whale hunting. Most of the people in the EU do not support whale hunting!
We can’t allow a trade agreement between the 'whale
friendly' EU and a country like Japan - a country that has just
announced that it will ignore an international court ban and kill 333
whales each year for the next 12 years in Antarctica.Let’s stop the slaughter for good. Ask the EU to use its power and say ‘no new trade agreement until the whaling stops’.

Oh the whale is free, of the boundless sea He lives for a thousand years; He sinks to rest on the billow’s breast, Nor the roughest tempest fears. The howling blast, as it rushes past, Is music to lull him to sleep: And he scatters the spray in his boisterous play, As he dashes – the King of the deep.

Thursday, 25 February 2016

The Lake District is intimately associated with English literature of the 18th and 19th centuries and WilliamWordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", inspired by the sight of daffodils on the shores of Ullswater, remains one of the most famous in the English language. Out of his long life of eighty years, sixty were spent amid its lakes
and mountains. Along with his companion Romantic writers, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey became known as the Lake Poets.

At Telrunya - Forest of Dreams

Romanticism, the leading literary movement in England for more
than half a century, was caused by the unprecedented social and economic changes of the 18th century
Industrial Revolution, which visited a cataclysmic change from simple home manufacturing and farming to
enforced wage slavery on the people. The 'Enclosure' of common lands spread all over Britain in the 18th century and deprived the people of their subsistence, they were subsequently forced to work in the new factories.

However mechanization without a thought for peoples wellbeing, brought new social evils. The
diseases of industrial towns flourished, along with the misery of child labour, underpaid workers and loss of freedom. Life for many became a hollow parody of its earlier pastoral peasantry as the people were imprisoned in the new industrial towns. Their suffering led to the first organised strikes. Inspired by the French Revolution, Irish peasants plotted a
rebellion against English landlordism in 1798, which was
cruelly downed in blood. The British government also took the lead in the
counter-revolutionary wars against France.

At this time, the belief of
progressive-minded people in the ideal nature of the new economic system,
was broken - people with a conscience for their fellow man looked about for solutions. A new humanist movement arose among artists, authors and musicians to voice this view.

As they saw it, the cold application of reason had led to the dehumanisation of man with its heartless persuit of profit for the wealthy by exploiting and disenfranchising the poor. The new humanist writers therefore made emotion the driving force of their works. Some among them, poets, seized with a panic to escape the modern world of an industrialised slavery, wanted a return to the bucolic earlier times when people lived on and by the land. These poets became known as the Romanticists. They
spoke for the English farmers and Scottish peasants who were ruined by
the Industrial Revolution. They idealized the patriarchal way of life
during the Middle Ages, a period that seemed to them harmonious and
peaceful. Their motto was "Close to Nature and from Nature to God",
because they believed that nature put man at peace with the world and in communion with god. (source)

The
poets William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772-1834), Robert Southey (1774-1843) belonged to that group. They
were also called the Lake Poets after the Lake District where they lived and where they found inspiration to fuel their poetic calls for a more harmonious world in touch with nature and through nature with god.

During the early 20th century, the children's author Beatrix Potter was in residence at Hill Top Farm, setting many of her famous illustrated books in the Lake District. Potter loved animals from an early age and had various pets that she made drawings of. Her parents rented Wray Castle near Ambleside and this is where Potter fell in love with the Lake District. As an adult, she lived most of her life in the Lake District, which
inspired her to write her books, in particular The Tale of Peter Rabbit. She also painted and sketched the Lake District’s landscapes. After
her death in 1943, she left her 14 farms and 4000 acres of land to the
National Trust, on the proviso that her favourite home, Hill Top at Sawrey, was opened to the public and left unchanged.

Recently Tate Britain hosted Schwitters in Britain,
the first major exhibition of his late work. This show focused on the
period after Schwitters’ arrival in Edinburgh as a refugee on the run
from Nazi Germany in 1940 where he had been persecuted as one of the so-called
"degenerate artists" until he died in Kendal in 1948, and it
referenced the Merzbarn, a work that the Tate now acknowledges as “one
of the key lost works of European Modernism”.
Landowner Harry Pierce, offered Schwitters the use of an empty shed on a small estate in Elterwater. Ian Hunter, from the Littoral Arts Trust, which now owns the site,
describes it as "at the epi-centre of British modernist movement'' - "I'd say to those down south, you have the Tate Modern, we have the original." And it is not the area's only claim to fame. "One valley away from here you've got Wordsworth, with his early support of the French revolution," Ian Hunter said. "Two
valleys away there's Ruskin [who championed the cause of Victorian
"modern painters"]. It's an extraordinary alignment of revolutionary
cultural thinking. "From high romanticism to modernism in three valleys."

At Netherwood virtual Lake District

Alfred Wainwright was born in 1907, and at 23 went to the Lake District for a holiday and immediately fell in love with the natural beauty of the Lakelands. He is well-known for his seven Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, which he made while working in the Borough Treasurers Office in Kendal in 1941. His handwritten and hand-drawn works of art have inspired all fell walkers for the last 40 years. A recreation of the Borough Treasurers Office in Kendal where he worked is exhibited in The Kendal Museum of Natural History.

At Netherwood virtual Lake District

At Netherwood virtual Lake District

There is nothing quite like the Lake District in the rest of England. The Pennines foreboding and austere, the Peak
District is too small in scale to astound. By contrast with these The Lake District is the one place where
nature seems truly awesome. Artists, poets, walkers and nature conservationists alike continue to find that the landscape
here provokes the specific ‘way of feeling’ that Baudelaire considered
crucial in 'romanticism'. It is the way the trees and rocks frame
views down majestic valleys, the play of light on distant
crests, the squat stone buildings that seem to have
tumbled from rock faces to assemble themselves deep embeded in the verdant rich turf.

At Netherwood virtual Lake District

At Telrunya - Forest of Dreams

The Lake
District is rich in
folklore, legends and superstitions shaped by the local landscape and
centuries of colonisation by Teutonic, Scandinavian and Norman settlers
with the traditional legends accompanied their cultures. Its large, imposing landscapes have nurtured
stories of giants, while more hidden corners are a breeding ground for
sightings of elves and fairies too.

Once part of the ancient kingdom of Rheged, the southern province of a
realm of Brithonic Celts which stretched from the English Lake District
to the river Clyde in Scotland, the modern county of Cumbria lies on
England's north western border. Uther Pendragon, father of the
legendary Arthur, is said to have ruled here in the 5th Century, and few
areas of Cumbria lack some association, however tenuous, with Arthurian
legend. However, while the wind-blasted fells appear to have held particular
spiritual importance for these post-Roman Celts, the stone monuments
that dot the bleak landscape are of far older origins, with a long
history of probable ritual or religious use.

The stone circles in Cumbria in general are of such antiquity, being the earliest stone circles in the whole of Europe. There is a vast range of types, from the vast monumental circles at
Castlerigg, Swinside and Long Meg, to the standard early bronze age
circles of about 100 ft in diameter as at Casterton and Elva Plain, to
diminutive rings associated with alignments and burials. Some are
associated with henge monuments such as Mayburgh.

Wherever you hail from or may be going to, The Lake District has been and will continue to be a source of inspiration for all that is best in our world. Living in harmony and cooperation with the spiritual immanence of nature in her most beautiful, remembering to care for the well being of our fellow man as well as our priceless and irreplacable natural heritage of wildlife and creatures.

If there is a heaven on Earth, i'd say it is to be found here....

Daffodils by William Wordsworth (1804)

I wander'd lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Thursday, 11 February 2016

Here's a tale of true Cumbrian spirit,
Of a Hedgehog with fine character and distinction and merit.
It all happened in the winter time not too long ago,
In December through February before coming of snow.

Infact it began with the most terrible floods,
When Cumbria submerged under Storm Desmond' scuds -
And half the wide world - well, of North England at least,
Below waters submereged, South England slept till it ceased.

As days rolled into nights and weeks into wondering,
The good people of this land united despite political blundering.
And many sorts of care they sent from kind hearts everywhere -
To help with housing and drying, heating and eating prepare.

To restore businesses and byways and bridges - those needing,
But not much thought in this time for our wildlife or its feeding.
Creatures and living things suffered the unspeakable end,
Swept across counties and fields, beyond life sadly transcend.

For the wild animals- birds- insects, the flood was a calamity...
Indiscriminate death struck beak-claw-wing, web and anttenaey.
Apocalyptic and Biblical in potent and style,
The preeceding rains saturated everyones mile.

Forty days, fifty nights and countless many more,
Torrents of heavy waters did relentless downpour.
That fluminous floodtide flyped our commonweal to extinction,
Its like was unseen despite the hydrologists prediction.

Plunging upon us without warning or caution,
No shape of its own nor a pause to its auction.
As the offspring of El Nino, of climate change and plutonium,
Outbid itself onward in joyless wetdrenched pandemonium.

Global warming the cause for those who can see,
Of cataclysmic upheaval in Gulf Stream - like a banshee.
Creating a convocation of waters finical in their fury,
Falling, swoosh-galling in their appalling abjury.

A Hedgehog hidding from somwhen waterish did declare,
To the welkin above, his will to survive overcoming despair.
'I call to you to stop your heartless cold waters',
He cried out as he swam, rushed and burrowed to new quarters.

Underneath waters and waters and wetness without end,
He swept swiftly down rivers that on his life did intend.
Calling in alarm to the dark minister of the storm,
He hooted and honked - across Fell lands he swarmed.

Past sodden amphibians and limpid land dwellers,
For dry land Hedgehog paddled, with his propellers.
Past Neolithic Shap to Kendal by Kent,
Hedgehog found a hillside to hang on to, his energy spent.

Eventually the raw raintide did lessen its beratement,
Of splashing relentless - at long last an abatement.
And in the stunned silence as waters backdated,
Fellow voyagers across land found themselves translocated.

In the silt slurried earth where we all make our home,
Every creature now surviving went out to roam.
Amidst this sodden turmoil the Hedgehog scurried forth,
And found a wooden shelter in our garden, west by north.

As covenant storms were over, a rainbow raised high,
Resplendant and bright in the returned new blue-sky.
And in his shelter, lets call it an Ark for the moment,
The Hedgehog's name became Noah, for Natures atonement.

Nocturnal in his new home Noah sings beneath the moon,
Softly and gentle of the earth and the wonders unknown.
His breath is quite gaspy and tuneful - if not musical quite,
Noah's the epitome of Cumbria - he's doing it right.

c.Titus.L. 2016

This poem is to celebrate the arival of Noah the Hedgehog in our lives after he has survived the trauma of Storm Desmond December 5th 2015 in Cumbria.

Hedgehogs are now a protected species in the Uk There is a Petition to give the hedgehog better legal protection to reverse its decline. Please sign the petition ( HERE )

Where do hedgehogs live?

Hedgehogs are
found in most parts of Britain, apart from very wet areas and extensive
pine forests. They are also often scarce in upland areas such as
moorlands and mountainsides. Hedgehogs are predominantly a woodland edge
species and can thrive in the mosaic of hedges, fields and woodlands
that charaterise the British countryside.

Hedgehogs can be just as happy in rural or urban locations

As the name suggests they are often found near hedgerows, which
provide ideal locations for nest sites, a good supply of invertebrates
on which they feed, protection from predators and important movement
corridors. The pastures used by farmers to raise cattle, sheep or horses
are important foraging areas for hedgehogs.

Gardens (and lots of them) provide everything hedgehogs need

Hedgehogs are also abundant in urban and suburban areas. Gardens
provide hedgehogs with a plentiful supply of food, both natural and
supplementary, as well as many potential nest sites for breeding, resting and hibernation. For these reason urban areas have become a stronghold for hedgehogs in recent years.

Access between gardens is critical for hedgehogs

Hedgehogs have home ranges but are not territorial so will not fight
to defend these areas. Radio-tracking studies have found that hedgehog
home ranges vary during the year (and between sexes) but are on average
around 10—20 hectares and they can roam an average distance of 2km on a
single night. Male hedgehogs in the breeding season can cover up to 3km
in one night in their search of females!
To help urban hedgehogs gardens need to be linked up so they have a sufficient area to roam – find out how to link your garden.

What do wild hedgehogs eat?

Hedgehogs are widely recognised as a potent ally in the garden, but what do they actually eat?

Hedgehogs mainly eat creepy crawlies

Hedgehogs are generalists and feed on a wide range of things, but the
majority of their diet is made up of invertebrates (or creepy
crawlies). We know what they eat from scientific studies that have
analysed hedgehog poo or looked in the stomachs of hedgehogs killed on
roads.
The most important invertebrates in their diet are worms, beetles, slugs, caterpillars, earwigs and millipedes.

As well as these,
they also eat a wide range of other insects, and more infrequently will
take advantage of carrion, frogs, baby rodents, baby birds, birds' eggs
and fallen fruit.

When you are putting out food for hedgehogs, you can replicate the hedgehog's natural diet by using unsalted nuts, mealworms and meat-based dog and cat food.

Diseases and parasites

External parasites of the hedgehog

Hedgehog fleas

Hedgehogs are renowned for having fleas. However, the fleas found on hedgehogs are actually hedgehog fleas (scientific name: Archaeopsylla erinacei)
which are host specific, meaning they will not survive for long on any
other species, be it pets or people. Occasionally hedgehogs can become
infested with fleas but usually they will only have a few resident fleas
which will cause them no harm.

Hedgehog ticks

Ticks are another common external parasite on hedgehogs. Usually an
individual will have a couple of ticks on it though occasionally there
are hedgehogs with heavier burdens. Ticks are commonly attached to the
underside, behind the ears or the flanks of hedgehogs but they can occur
elsewhere as well. Ticks are in general harmless to hedgehogs. However,
a high parasite load can be indicative of sickness.
Ringworm can also be quite prevalent in hedgehogs, with around a
quarter of the national population thought to be affected. Most
hedgehogs show no visible symptoms and even those with severe infections
can still show little sign of skin infection and can feed normally.
Dry, crusty ears are one of the most common symptoms of a ringworm
infection.

Internal parasites

Hedgehogs can be host to a number of different parasitic worms, with
lungworm being especially prevalent in European hedgehogs. Lungworm
infection can result in a dry rattling cough and can prove fatal if left
untreated. A mild worm burden is to be expected in most hedgehogs but
this should cause few problems to them.

Why are hedgehogs declining?

This issue
is not a straightforward one as there could be many factors that are
contributing to the decline of hedgehog populations. This is further
complicated by populations declining in both urban and rural habitats
where the pressures and changes in the environment are very different.

Research is underway to teach us more about why hedgehogs are declining and what we can do about it

PTES and BHPS are currently commissioning various research projects
into the reasons for their decline and measures that could be taken to
reverse the effects.